My former Post colleague Tracy Thompson has two daughters in a Washington area school district. I promised not to say which one. It doesn’t matter, because the issue she raises involves all high-tech schools, of which we have many.
People aren’t using the new Web features designed to help families. Is it because parents like me are technophobes? Not entirely. The reluctant participants who concern Thompson are teachers.
Both of Thompson’s kids have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. They have trouble getting their work done. Her school district, like several in the area, has Web sites on which parents can see their children’s assignments. That way, they cannot be fooled by sly evasions when they ask their children, sitting in front of the TV, whether they have any homework.
Thompson was delighted to discover the Web homework schedules when her older daughter was a sixth-grader. Disappointment followed, she said, when “I found out only about half of her teachers used it. Some teachers were weeks behind in updating the info. My older daughter is off to high school next year and has matured amazingly over the past three years, so I don’t have to worry that much about her stuff anymore. But now my younger daughter is in third grade, and I am in my second year of trying to get her teachers to use the Web.”
Advanced Placement classes, once open to only a very small number of top high school students around the country, have grown enormously in the past decade. The number of students taking these courses rose by nearly 50 percent to 1.6 million from 2004 to 2009. Yet in a survey of A.P. teachers released this year, more than half said that “too many students overestimate their abilities and are in over their heads.” Some 60 percent said that “parents push their children into A.P. classes when they really don’t belong there.”
Does the growth in Advanced Placement courses serve students or schools well? Are there downsides to pushing many more students into taking these rigorous courses?
Kristin Klopfenstein, economist
Trevor Packer, College Board
Patrick Welsh, high school teacher
Philip M. Sadler, Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics
David Wakelyn, National Governors Association
Saul Geiser, Center for Studies in Higher Education
If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition. “According to Webster’s,” begins a piece, blithely, and the lexicographer shudders, because she knows that a dictionary is about to be invoked as an incontrovertible authority. Although we may profess to believe, as the linguist Dwight Bolinger once put it, that dictionaries “do not exist to define but to help people grasp meanings,” we don’t often act on that belief. Typically we treat a definition as the final arbiter of meaning, a scientific pronouncement of a word’s essence.
But the traditional dictionary definition, although it bears all the trappings of authority, is in fact a highly stylized, overly compressed and often tentative stab at capturing the consensus on what a particular word “means.” A good dictionary derives its reputation from careful analysis of examples of words in use, in the form of sentences, also called citations. The lexicographer looks at as many citations for each word as she can find (or, more likely, can review in the time allotted) and then creates what is, in effect, a dense abstract, collapsing into a few general statements all the ways in which the word behaves. A definition is as convention-bound as a sonnet and usually more compact. Writing one is considered, at least by anyone who has ever tried it, something of an art.
The district received an initial solicitation from the state DPI regarding “Race to the top” funds. The race to the top funds will be divided into two parts, with half of the funds going to districts that agree to implement programs in 5 areas outlined in the memorandum:
As Michigan school districts fight to cope with state cuts, urban districts have a fallback their suburban and rural counterparts are less likely to get: direct grants from the federal stimulus package.
Schools in low-income areas such as Detroit, Grand Rapids and Flint are getting direct grants from the Recovery Act that easily exceed the cuts of at least $165 per student districts will lose in state aid this fiscal year.
Wealthier suburban districts are getting far less direct help from the stimulus package. That leaves them with fewer sources to tap to avoid teacher layoffs and program cuts that some districts could see starting in January.
Detroit schools are “aggressively pursuing” the Recovery Act cash, spokesman Steven Wasko said. The district expects to receive roughly $800 million over more than two years from all sources of the broad program, including money that could help the district reduce class sizes and build or remodel schools.
Enough talk about a teacher’s strike.
Enough talk about recalling Detroit Federation of Teachers president Keith Johnson, the first president the union has had in a long time who is dealing with the reality of a broke district and broken economy.
In the wake of the DFT ratifying its contract with the district, a minority of unhappy teachers has called for Johnson’s head.
To that vocal minority, let me say two things:
$219 million.
84,000 children.
The first is the school district’s deficit. The second is the number of children who should be at the forefront of all of our thoughts and efforts.
The facts of the braid-cutting case are not in dispute.
A Milwaukee Public Schools teacher was so upset with the behavior of a 7-year-old first-grader, she decided as punishment to cut off a section of her braided hair in front of a classroom of stunned students.
When she was done, she threw the piece of braided hair in a trash can and dared the girl to go home and tell her mother.
The child did just that.
The student’s mother complained to school authorities that her daughter had been humiliated, confused and hurt by the teacher’s actions. In response, the teacher was reported to authorities and she received a $175 ticket for disorderly conduct.
The girl was transferred to another classroom while the teacher faces a disciplinary hearing.
As promised, to end this series on adjusting schools to the new economy, I had an email chat with Tony Wagner, co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of “The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach The New Survival Skills Our Children Need–and What We Can Do About It.” We limited ourselves to no more than 100 words per response, to keep it moving. Here goes:
Mathews: I loved your book, as you saw in my review last week. It is the best book ever written about the 21st century skills movement. But why were you so hard on Advanced Placement? There are many AP teachers who think the program is terrific for the typical schools where they work (you focused on some of the tiny upper crust schools that are a different issue) and who are trying to do everything you and I want them to do. Why not see AP (and IB, which is pretty near exactly what you want) as a great platform for change rather than the enemy?
Conrad Farner is like a guy with a beautiful home and an ugly checkbook.
It’s impossible to escape the irony as the superintendent of Greenfield schools conducts a tour of the community’s high school, where the finishing touches are being put on a $48.5 million overhaul that has turned a building that was literally sinking into the ground and, in serious ways, falling apart, into a showcase.
Handsome classrooms, a spacious gym, great theater, terrific swimming pool, a set of new athletic fields. It’s an impressive setting for the 1,200 students (22% of them not from Greenfield, by the way). Only a few parts of the old high school were kept while the new structure was built around it.
But the subject of our conversation is Farner’s strong warnings that the actual work of education in Greenfield schools is being cut, year by year, in ways that are taking a serious toll.
And, he argues, unless something changes quickly in the way Wisconsin funds schools, Greenfield – along with numerous districts across the state – will reach a point where it will simply not be able to pay its bills or will have to go back to voters seeking operating money beyond the state-set limits.
The district budget this year “is not even close to what our students need,” he said in a presentation to the Greenfield School Board before the budget was adopted. He has a list of 122 positions or services that have been eliminated or reduced since 2002-’03.
Some of them are pretty minor. Some of them are matters of doing business smarter and more efficiently. But some of them affect kids in ways that really matter – fewer teaching specialists, fewer counselors, fewer extra-curricular activities. The ratio of students to teachers has risen in Greenfield from 13.8 in 2004-’05 to 15.9 this year, a sizable jump.
At the December 16, 2009 general membership meeting, Madison Board of Education Member Beth Moss and County Board Supervisors John Hendrick, Al Matano, Kyle Richmond and Barbara Vedder were enthusiastically endorsed for re-election.
As college students finish up their first semester, it’s not just time to take a break, it’s also time to look at grades and study how well their college career is going. But it’s not just an individual assessment — it’s also an assessment of how well their K-12 schooling prepared them to compete in the world beyond high school.
According to Madison School Board member Ed Hughes, information from students is one of the most important ways to test how effective schools or school districts are serving their communities.
“Probably the best single source of information about how well we’re doing comes from students themselves, and how well-prepared they feel when they go out into the world,” says Hughes, a board member since 2008 as well as an attorney and a parent.
Earlier this year, Hughes — who has a daughter who is a senior at East High School and a son in college — did an informal survey of students who had graduated from the Madison Metropolitan School District and were now either in college, graduate school or the work force. The 143 respondents ranged from the graduating classes of 1999 through 2008; most had graduated from Madison schools within the last five years.
The waiting is finally over for some of the District of Columbia’s most ambitious school children and their parents. Democrats in Congress voted to kill the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides 1,700 disadvantaged kids with vouchers worth up to $7,500 per year to attend a private school.
On Sunday the Senate approved a spending bill that phases out funding for the five-year-old program. Several prominent Senators this week sent a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid pleading for a reconsideration. Signed by Independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman, Democrats Robert Byrd and Dianne Feinstein, and Republicans Susan Collins and John Ensign, it asked to save a program that has “provided a lifeline to many low-income students in the District of Columbia.” President Obama signed the bill Thursday.
The program’s popularity has generated long waiting lists. A federal evaluation earlier this year said the mostly black and Hispanic participants are making significant academic gains and narrowing the achievement gap. But for the teachers unions, this just can’t happen. The National Education Association instructed Democratic lawmakers to kill it.
I am keeping my weekly Extra Credit column alive on this blog with occasional answers to reader questions, the format of that column I did for many years in the Extras before they died. This teacher, Michael Feinberg (no relation to the co-founder of the KIPP schools with the same name), sent me a copy of an intriguing letter about physics he sent to the Montgomery County school superintendent, and agreed to let me get an answer and use it here.
Dear Dr. Weast:
I am a retired MCPS teacher; I taught Physics at both Kennedy H.S. and Whitman H.S. until the time that I retired in 2005. After retirement I have, on occasion, tutored Physics students.
When the 9th grade Physics curriculum was introduced I opposed it on the grounds that Physics should be taught at a higher mathematical level. While tutoring students in both grades 9 and 11/12 I see that this is true; students in 11th grade learn rigorous Physics with mathematical applications while students in 9th grade usually do descriptive worksheets. I believe that it unfair that students in 9 th grade receive the same honors credit for what is promoted as the same curriculum but is not the same.
On the heels of the Detroit Federation of Teachers approving a contract agreement with Detroit Public Schools, an effort to oust the union president is heating up.
Union members said Saturday they’ve nearly collected the 1,000 signatures needed to force a re-vote on Keith Johnson — a driving force behind the new contract, which requires most union members to defer $10,000 in pay and calls for wide-ranging school reforms.
“We’re not going to accept this,” Heather Miller, a math teacher at Marquette Elementary School, said Saturday, adding that a grievance has been filed over the voting process, including alleged flawed voter rosters and what those who filed the grievance consider wrongly placing information on the ballot about the dangers of a no vote. She said a hearing date on the grievance has not yet been set.
“This is about the future of Detroit; the future of our school district,” she said.
Greg Mortenson’s first book, “Three Cups of Tea,” was a gravity-defying, wide-screen, wilderness adventure. It began with the author’s failed attempt to climb the world’s second-highest mountain. It included a daring rescue, a bonding with an alien tribe in a tiny cliffside village and his establishment of several dozen schools in Taliban territory despite being kidnapped and threatened with death.
That book, which came out in 2006, was a publishing-industry cliffhanger, too. Mortenson hated the subtitle Penguin insisted on: “One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism One School at a Time.” It sold nicely in hardcover, enough to merit a paperback edition and to persuade the publisher to insert Mortenson’s preferred subtitle: “One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time.”
Ninety cameras will be installed outside Fenger and 39 other Chicago Public high schools to stop what Mayor Daley called the ugly “epidemic of children killing children,” thanks to a $2.25 million gift from the banking giant that employs the mayor’s brother.
Last year, a bloody weekend for CPS students prompted Daley to link 4,844 cameras inside schools and 1,437 exterior school cameras to police districts, squad cars and the 911 center. Until that time, real-time video from school cameras was accessible only to school security.
Thanks to J.P. Morgan Chase, where William Daley serves as Midwest chairman, 40 more high schools will get exterior cameras. They include Fenger, where 16-year-old Derrion Albert was beaten to death in September during a brawl captured on videotape and played around the world.
Another camera will be installed outside Walter H. Dyett High School, 555 E. 51st St., where two students have been murdered this year.
Ten privacy groups have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over recent changes to Facebook’s privacy policy.
Led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the groups criticize Facebook for changes that made previously private information public.
“More than 100 million people in the United States subscribe to the Facebook service,” Marc Rotenberg, EPIC’s executive director, said Thursday in a prepared statement. “The company should not be allowed to turn down the privacy dial on so many American consumers.”
In response, Facebook said it was “disappointed” that EPIC took its complaints to the FTC instead of the company itself.
Before Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for African-Americans was nineteen percent. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2004 the illegitimate black birthrate was 69.4 percent. In contrast, the out-of-wedlock rates that year for Caucasians and Hispanics were 25 and 45 percent respectively. Consequently, in America well over half of our minority population enters the education sweepstakes with one parent tied behind their back. Our largest minorities groups have a parent gap that not only precedes the performance differential in math in reading, it guarantees it.
We are living in a moment in time where otherwise reasonable people debate the merits of raising a child in a same-sex-marriage home. Consequently, it is culturally reasonable to argue whether wealthy Americans can raise children in single-parent homes without handicapping their education. That said, it is criminally insane to suggest that a single parent of limited means is doing anything other than providing a rough life for both child and mother. Frankly, I have had it with televised images of sobbing single parent mothers lamenting the demise of their fatherless children because of the misdeeds of someone else’s single-parent child.
President Barack Obama spoke at Wright Middle School in Madison last month and urged our nation to make improving K-12 education a national priority.
The president underscored the critical link between improving education and our nation’s future economy. He called for our schools to push all students to achieve at higher levels.
The president also spoke about our need to raise the bar for student achievement and to close existing achievement gaps. He is offering the states $4.35 billion in competitive “Race to the Top” grants to try to spur improvement.
His call for reform comes at a critical time for our schools. Our graduates face an increasingly competitive world. The future of our state rests on our ability to prepare our students with the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed.
In recent years, however, the real struggle in Wisconsin has been in maintaining the quality public school system created by previous generations. Our public schools operate under a financial system that chokes reform and chips away at quality.
Underwood’s School of Education has a close relationship with the Madison School District via grants and other interactions. Former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater now works for the School along with former Administrator Jack Jorgenson. Underwood attended the 2008 Madison Superintendent candidate public appearances.
It is a chance L.A. Unified all but squanders, according to interviews with more than 75 teachers and administrators, analyses of district data over the last several years, and internal and independent studies. Among the findings:
Nearly all probationary teachers receive a passing grade on evaluations. Fewer than 2% are denied tenure.
The reviews are so lacking in rigor as to be meaningless, many instructors say. Before a teacher gets tenure, school administrators are required to conduct only a single, pre-announced classroom visit per year. About half the observations last 30 minutes or less. Principals are rarely held responsible for how they perform the reviews.
The district’s evaluation of teachers does not take into account whether students are learning. Principals are not required to consider testing data, student work or grades. L.A. Unified, like other districts in California, essentially ignores a state law that since the 1970s has required districts to weigh pupil progress in assessing teachers and administrators.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls himself a big fan of National Board Certification for Teachers.
“What if every child had a chance to be taught by a National Board Certified teacher? I think the difference it would make in our students’ lives would be extraordinary,” he said recently.
Unfortunately, every child doesn’t have that chance. In fact, most don’t. But a growing number of teachers nationally and in Alabama are becoming board certified.
Nationally, more than 82,000 teachers are board certified, with nearly 8,900 joining the ranks this year. Alabama has 233 newly certified teachers, bringing the state’s total to 1,781, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards announced Wednesday. Alabama ranks 11th nationally in the number of teachers board certified this year, and 13th in the total number of certified teachers.
I applaud the work of the Board of Education in their efforts to downsize the district’s infrastructure. During my service on the board, I learned how difficult that process can be when various factions of the community come before the board pleading to save their favorite schools. In fact, many current board members have campaigned for their buildings in the past. They cited educational studies praising the positive influences of small neighborhood schools and how important it was to maintain the configuration at that time. It appears they have now come to realize instead that what they once called warehousing of students does not lead to an adverse learning environment and that larger schools can indeed contribute to student success. That observation is supported by their decision to replace the plan that placed 400 students in each of six buildings to one that has three buildings with approximately 500 students and three with many fewer students.
Now the public is being asked to spend millions on four buildings Ridge Mills, John Joy, Denti and Gansevoort. I suggest that the board reconsider the proposition and look to renovate three buildings. Instead of closing Ridge Mills, they could close both Ridge Mills and John Joy that currently serve a total of 481 students. The combination would still be smaller in size than either Denti or Bellamy (about 500 and 485 students, respectively). The board can renovate either one of the closed buildings and reopen it to provide adequate space for their students and result in one less building for the district to maintain.
Parents would be able to yank their children out of failing schools and ask any other school in the state to admit them under a compromise bill approved Thursday by the state Senate.
That change and other proposals are part of the state’s plan to compete for President Obama’s Race to the Top grants – up to $4.3 billion for all states and as much as $700 million for California alone.
States have until next month to apply for the federal grants, but political fighting over how to make California as competitive as possible has killed two competing proposals and left little time before the Jan. 19 application deadline.
To qualify, states have been asked to demonstrate a commitment to education reform. Under the bill, California would establish specific plans for failing schools, including closing a school, dismissing the principal and up to half of the teachers, or allowing the school to become a charter school.
Talk-show superstar extraordinaire Oprah Winfrey has made a very generous donation to an inner-city school in Atlanta, Georgia. The $1.5M donation isn’t the first time that Oprah Winfrey has contributed to this school.
In December 2008, Oprah gave The Ron Clark Academy $365,000.00 to be used toward their operating costs. The private middle school’s founder Ron Clark has made several appearances on Oprah’s wildly popular talk show. Ron Clark is also the author of “The Essential 55,” a book about life lessons that adults should teach to children.
Plans for the generous donation include the construction of a theater, a cafeteria, and a gym.
Arriving in Christmas mail, the heaviest letter of them all: next term’s school fees. A century ago, the cost of a private education at a secondary British school was about seven guineas, roughly £7.35 or one and half ounces of gold. Today, the average bill is £4,000 a term, or six ounces of gold. At the most prestigious boarding schools, such as Eton, a term’s fees can reach £9,000 (before extras). That takes the total cost of a private secondary education to as much as £135,000 – about half a gold ingot.
Talk about a heavy load. During the past decade, school fees have risen by three-quarters. Broader UK inflation, meanwhile, has been about 20 per cent. Everything is relative, however, and by some measures school fees have actually fallen. Take what is typically the largest asset owned by a private educating family, their home. Now match it against their largest cost. In 1999, the value of an average UK house was equivalent to five years of Eton fees. Today it would buy almost 6 years.
Like a Lincoln Center hopeful, Aislee Nieves spends most afternoons in her cramped living room, the couch pulled aside so she can perfect her pointed toes and pirouettes. A spreadsheet tells her the tryouts she has attended, where and when the next one is and the one after that.
On a recent Sunday she flitted about her apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, collecting what she needed that day: ballet slippers, leotard, footless tights, all slipped into her bright green knapsack.
“Mommy, you have the admission ticket? And my transcript?” she asked, her 13-year-old voice betraying a slight edginess.
Yes, yes, her mother, Blanca Vasquez, answered. After all, they had been auditioning for high school nearly every weekend for the last month.
The high school admission process in New York City is notoriously dizzying, with each eighth grader asked to rank up to a dozen choices, and the most competitive schools requiring tests, essays or interviews. But for hundreds of students who sing, dance, act or play an instrument, trying out for the ninth grade is now an all-consuming routine.
What does mastery of the finer points of English grammar have to do with succeeding in business?
Nothing.
But if you want to get into a top business school, you need to do well on the GMAT. And that means tangling with some very ugly verbal questions.
Specifically, it means psychoanalyzing the folks who put the test together, who sometimes don’t include a correct English answer as one of the options.
When there’s no right answer to a question (which there often isn’t in business), you have to figure out the least-wrong answer–without being driven insane by rage at the stupidity of your questioner. Thus, the GMAT tests your aptitude for all sorts of things you WILL need in business.
The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its 2009 word of the year. It is “unfriend”, as in “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight”.
Unfriend has “currency and potential longevity”, says Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary programme. It is true, she says, that most words with the prefix “un-” are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant) but there are some “un-” verbs, such as unpack and uncap. “Unfriend has real lex-appeal,” she says.
“Unfriend” will irritate those who oppose the nasty habit of turning nouns into verbs. But nouns have been turning into verbs for ages. In his book The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker estimates that a fifth of English verbs started as nouns, including “to progress”, “to contact” and “to host”.
Also, many supposedly new words are not new at all. “Unfriend” has an ancient past, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1659, Thomas Fuller wrote in The Appeal of Injured Innocence: “I hope, Sir, that we are not mutually Unfriended by this Difference which hath happened betwixt us.”
I am interested in the words that did not make word of the year. They included “paywall” (admitting only paying subscribers to part of a website) and “birther” (someone who believes Barack Obama was not born in the US).
Without discussion, the Milwaukee School Board voted 7-0 Thursday night to make condoms available at many of the city’s high schools, paving the way to make Milwaukee Public Schools one of the relatively few districts in the nation to provide contraception to students.
The communicable disease prevention program, as the district calls it, could be in place as soon as the 2010-’11 school year.
The proposal sparked some opposition after being made public Dec. 2, but the board approved the condom distribution without much dissent. Comments from the public are not allowed at board meetings and a board committee had voted 5-0 on Dec. 9 to recommend adopting the program.
The condoms will be available free of charge, but only to students in high schools that have school nurses and only after students request them at the nurse’s office, according to a fact sheet circulated by the school district. Up to two condoms will be distributed at a time.
Thursday’s vote does not authorize funding for the program, but the district has said it will not use taxpayer money to buy condoms and instead will seek other sources of funding.
With 809, California leads the nation in the number of charter schools. In less than 20 years, the education activists have started nearly 5,000 of these institutions, which are publicly financed and free for students to attend but independently operated.
Determined not to leave up to $400 million in federal funds on the table, state lawmakers appear determined this week to resolve differences in House and Senate bills that mandate significant changes in public schools.
To qualify for the Race to the Top federal stimulus money, Michigan would have to make changes to allow merit pay for teachers, lessen restrictions on opening charter schools, plan for sanctions for underperforming schools and make it easier for people to become teachers. Teachers unions and local school officials have fought the ideas in the past.
Rep. Tim Melton, D-Auburn Hills, said state and federal initiatives will produce “a sea change” in the way troubled schools operate and kids learn. “It’s a huge deal,” he said.
And it’s a lot of money for a state with big money problems. The Democrat-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate have approved different versions of legislation that must be resolved before Gov. Jennifer Granholm can sign it.
The international hacker who has admitted to stealing more than 130 million payment card numbers has mounted a new defense claim that he might suffer from Asperger’s syndrome, a court filing indicates.
On Tuesday, attorneys for Albert Gonzalez filed a report from a forensic psychologist that questioned the criminal hacker’s “capacity to knowingly evaluate the wrongfulness of his actions and consciously behave lawfully and avoid crime,” according to federal prosecutors. The report went on to state that his “behavior was consistent with description of the Asperger’s disorder.”
Gonzalez becomes the latest hacker under prosecution to raise the Asperger’s defense in arguing for leniency. Most notably, NASA hacker Gary McKinnon has cited the Autism-related disorder in fighting extradition to the US to face computer trespass charges. UK Home Secretary Alan Johnson has repeatedly rejected claims raised by McKinnon’s attorneys and supporters and has indicated he will not stop the forced transfer.
University of Wisconsin campuses have a well-deserved reputation for being safe havens for liberal thought. But at the UW-Fox Valley, something odd is happening – it appears a backlash is underway.
It all began in November, when Campus Dean Dr. James Perry suggested on his blog that the campus should have more “green” parking spaces. Apparently, the campus has set aside certain choice parking spots for students with Priuses (Prii?) or other “low emitting and fuel efficient” (LEFEV) vehicles. Dr. Perry suggested expanding the number of “green” spaces, to encourage more students to buy these cars, saying:
I share this secret only with recluses like myself who lack the imagination to conceive of any gift better than a book. If you are buying for a child — particularly if you are in a last-minute Christmas shopping panic — scan this list compiled by a company called Renaissance Learning.
It is an amazing document. Parents who keep track of what their children are doing in school, particularly in this area, might be vaguely aware of Renaissance Learning and its famous product, Accelerated Reader, the most influential reading program in the country. It was started 23 years ago by Judi Paul and her husband, Terry, after she invented on her kitchen table a quizzing system to motivate their children to read.
Students read books, some assigned but many chosen on their own, and then take computer quizzes, either online or with Accelerated Reader software, to see whether they understood what they read. Students compile points based in part on the difficulty and length of each book and sometimes earn prizes from their schools.
They are two of the clearest reasons to be both discouraged and hopeful about public education in Tampa Bay. The wide disparities in passing rates for Advanced Placement exams, often within the same high school, indicate a failure by district superintendents and school principals to hold teachers accountable for performance. Looking forward, a $100 million grant to Hillsborough schools by the Gates Foundation offers a wonderful opportunity to improve teacher training and match salaries to more sophisticated measures of performance. The bold experimentation in Hillsborough could show the way to address the sorts of shortcomings exposed by the analysis of AP exams.
There are more immediate steps that can be taken to address a system that rewards schools for increasing the number of students taking AP exams but ignores teachers with ridiculously low exam passing rates. The state should proceed with plans to put more weight on passing rates in evaluating high schools. The schools should re-examine their policies that encourage even unprepared students to take college-level AP classes. Students should be challenged with rigorous courses, but it is a disservice to admit those who have virtually no chance to grasp the material well enough to pass the exam. That is a waste of time and taxpayers’ money.
Dallas has more public schools rated as failures by the Texas Education Agency than any other district, with 48 campuses among the 499 on this year’s list of the state’s worst.
The list released Tuesday consists of schools where student test scores were too low or recent school ratings were “unacceptable,” giving students the right to transfer next year under the state’s Public Education Grant program.
The number of Dallas Independent School District campuses on the list is down slightly from last year, when 52 schools were singled out. But Dallas is by far the state leader; Fort Worth and Houston tied for second with 30 campuses each.
Schools on the list had 50 percent or more students fail the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in two of the last three years, or an “academically unacceptable” rating in one of the last three years.
Only a small number of the estimated 350,000 students eligible to transfer from the 499 schools – about 6.5 percent of the state’s campuses – are expected to do so, because the state provides no funding for transportation. Officials have said lack of transportation is one of the biggest obstacles for students and parents interested in switching schools under the program.
Typically, fewer than 1,000 students statewide exercise the transfer option each year.
A Taunton, Massachusetts father is furious that his 8-year-old son was sent home from school and required to undergo a psychological evaluation.
All this comes the boy drawing a picture of Jesus on the cross. It was part of a second grade Christmas assignment.
The student was ordered into counseling by his principal. After the little boy did go into counseling, and the doctor said he was fine, but his father says his son is now uncomfortable in school.
Chester Johnson, father: “I want to transfer him to another school and I want something done about this. They owe my family an apology and they owe me an apology.”
via a kind reader’s email; Letter from Governor Doyle and Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers [107K PDF]:
We are excited to invite you to participate in Wisconsin’s Race to the Top application to the federal government. Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama and Congress provided $4 billion in competitive grant funding to states that move forward with innovations and reform in education.
Earlier this fall, at our request, the Wisconsin Legislature passed bills to make Wisconsin both eligible and more competitive for the Race to the Top grants. Now our local school district leaders – school board members, superintendents, principals, teachers, and other staff – need to prepare their district for participation in Wisconsin’s grant application. Enclosed is the Race to the Top district memorandum of understanding (MOU) that the federal government requires participating districts to sign as part of the state’s Race to the Top grant application. The MOU provides a framework of collaboration between districts and the state articulating the specific roles and responsibilities necessary to implement an approved Race to the Top district grant.
The MOU is divided into two parts – Exhibit I and Exhibit II. To receive any Race to the Top funding, a district must agree to the activities in Exhibit I. Districts that agree to Exhibit I are eligible, if they so choose, to participate in Exhibit II. In Exhibit II districts will receive additional funding for participating in the additional activities. Exhibit I is included in this information and Exhibit II will be forthcoming in the very near future.
My guest today is Donalyn Miller, a sixth-grade language arts teacher in Texas and literacy expert. She is the author of “The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child,” and writes about literacy for teachermagazine.org.
By Donalyn Miller
A recent Carnegie Mellon University research study indicates that children engaged in a 100-hour intensive reading remediation program improved both their reading ability and the white matter connections in their brains.
While the study shows promise for educators and clinicians who work with developing readers, one casual mention in the study stood out for me– the 25 children designated as “excellent readers” in the control group still outperformed the 35 third and fifth graders who participated in the remediation program.
The widespread belief that some readers possess an innate gift, like artists or athletes, sells many children short. I often hear parents claim, “Well, my child is just not a reader,” as if the reading fairy passed over their child while handing out the good stuff.
Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports [182K PDF]:
Overall academic progress continued while the gap between white and African‐American football student‐athletes increased slightly for the 67* Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools (formerly known as Division I‐A schools) playing in this year’s college football bowl games according to a study released today by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida.
Richard Lapchick, the Director of TIDES and the primary author of the study Keeping Score When It Counts: Assessing the 2009‐10 Bowl‐bound College Football Teams – Academic Performance Improves but Race Still Matters, noted that, “The academic success of big time college student‐athletes that grew continuously under the leadership of the late Dr. Myles Brand continued this year and will be part of his legacy. The new study shows additional progress and reinforces the success of Dr. Brand’s academic reform package. This year, 91 percent (61 of the 67 schools), the same as in the 2008‐09 report and up from 88 percent in the 2007‐08 report, had at least a 50 percent graduation rate for their football teams; approximately 90 percent of the teams received a score of more than 925 on the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate (APR) versus 88 percent in the 2008‐09 report.”
The NCAA created the APR in 2004 as part of an academic reform package designed to more accurately measure student‐athlete’s academic success as well as improve graduation rates at member institutions.
Lapchick added that, “In spite of the good news, the study showed that the disturbing gap between white and African‐American football student‐athletes remains a major issue; 21 teams or 31 percent of the bowl‐bound schools graduated less than half of their African‐American football student‐athletes, while only two schools graduated less than half of their white football student‐athletes.”
Previous research has found that male high school athletes experience better outcomes than non-athletes, including higher educational attainment, employment rates, and wages. However, students self-select into athletics so these may be selection effects rather than causal effects. To address this issue, I examine Title IX which provides a unique quasi- experiment in female athletic participation. Between 1972 and 1978 U.S. high schools rapidly increased their female athletic participation rates–to approximately the same level as their male athletic participation rates–in order to comply with Title IX. This paper uses variation in the level of boys’ athletic participation across states before Title IX as an instrument for the change in girls’ athletic participation over the 1970s. Analyzing differences in outcomes for both the pre- and post-Title IX cohorts across states, I find that a 10-percentage point rise in state-level female sports participation generates a 1 percentage point increase in female college attendance and a 1 to 2 percentage point rise in female labor force participation. Furthermore, greater opportunities to play sports leads to greater female participation in previously male-dominated occupations, particularly for high-skill occupations.
ata from the NCAA’s most recent study on revenue and expenses [6MB PDF Complete Report] at Division I institutions show a slight moderation in the rate of spending in the aggregate within the division and a reduced growth in the gap between the so-called “haves” and “have-nots,” though the gap continues to be wide.
The report summarizing Division I athletics program finances between 2004 and 2008 also reveals that 25 schools – all in the Football Bowl Subdivision – reported positive net revenue for the 2008 fiscal year, six more than in the 2006 fiscal year. Only 18 FBS institutions, however, have reported revenue over expenses when the data from all five years are aggregated.
The findings make NCAA officials cautiously optimistic that the advice from former NCAA President Myles Brand’s Presidential Task Force three years ago to moderate spending is being heeded, though those same officials acknowledge that these data through the end of the 2008 fiscal year (June) do not reflect the subsequent economic downturn that may reveal a different story on spending in next year’s report.
A decade of pesky germs, from SARS to avian flu to H1N1, has given rise to dozens of products bragging about their microbe-killing properties. Everything from hand-sanitizing liquids to products like computer keyboards, shopping carts and tissues tout that they kill 99.9%, or 99.99%, of common bacteria and fungi.
But some of these numbers look like the test scores in a class with a very generous grading curve. They often don’t include all pesky germs, and are based on laboratory tests that don’t represent the imperfections of real-world use. Human subjects, or countertops, in labs are cleaned first, then covered on the surface with a target bug. That is a far cry from a typical kitchen or a pair of grimy hands.
About 1 in 7 American teens with cellphones say they have received nude or nearly nude photos by text message, according to a new survey on the phenomenon known as “sexting.”
Helping to define the little-understood trend in teen life, the poll found that 15 percent of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have received sexually suggestive photos or videos on their personal cellphones. Just 4 percent acknowledged sending out a naked image.
Older teens were more likely to report sexting, with 30 percent of 17-year-olds saying they had received such photos, compared with 4 percent of 12-year-olds, according to the report by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.
The provocative photos are usually sent as part of a romantic relationship — or one that is wished-for, the study found.
Let me tell you about my recent trip to Sacramento. It is a story about why we need a revolution.
Earlier this month, Senate leaders introduced a “parent trigger” into California’s “Race to the Top” education reform legislation.
Under the policy, parents at a systemically failing school could circulate a petition calling for change. If 51% of the parents signed it, the school would be converted to a charter school or reconstituted by the school district, with a new staff and new ways of operating. The concept recognized a truth that school officials often discount: Parents are in the best position to make decisions about what’s right for their kids.
Last week, the parent trigger legislation moved to the Assembly Education Committee, chaired by Assemblywoman Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica). Thousands of parents sent letters, made calls, staged protests and showed up to testify before her committee about the importance of parents taking back power over our schools.
I don’t mean this as a criticism of my talented colleague Bill Turque. He was reporting the news, as usual. But I did not like the focus of his otherwise irreproachable Sunday story on the achievement gap not narrowing in the D.C. schools.
Turque was letting us know that despite the growth in D.C. math scores, the gap between black and white students had gotten larger for fourth-graders. This was an important topic in education circles, so he had to report it.
But I think the achievement gap is useless as a measure of school improvement, and we would be much better writing about how much each ethnic group, each school, each child is improving, or not improving. Our gap fixation puts us in a very awkward position.
You see it. It’s simple. It forces us to hope that white kids, or middle class kids, or high achieving kids, don’t improve.
The Wauwatosa School Board has ratified a contract that will give steep pay raises to the district’s most experienced teachers while also winning an important concession for the district with a change in retiree health insurance benefits.
The agreement, approved by the board on Monday and by the Wauwatosa Education Association on Friday, increases teachers’ salaries and benefits by 4.76% this school year and by 4.25% in the following year. The top pay for the most experienced teachers will increase by more than 8% to $74,030. Teachers with doctorate degrees can receive annual stipends of $1,415.
With the agreement, district officials were able to accomplish a goal by getting teacher approval to change health insurance benefits for future retirees. While teachers now receive health insurance after they retire based on the number of years they have worked for the district, teachers hired after July 2010 will be awarded stipends tied to their final salaries with which they can pay for their health insurance, said Daniel Chanen, Wauwatosa’s director of human resources.
With a concussion, there is no obvious injury – no blood, no swelling, no arm at an awkward angle.
Coaches and athletic trainers have to look for subtle signs from an athlete, such as a shake of the head, a vacant expression or a long pause before a football player lines up for the next play.
Until the past few years, a student athlete in Mesquite might have gone back into the game after a quick assessment. But that’s changing as officials realize how common concussions are and how profound their effects can be over time.
“If a kid suffers a concussion in Mesquite, they are going to miss a minimum of two weeks,” said Bucky Taylor, Mesquite High School’s head athletic trainer.
A bill that would give the state schools chief more power to fix chronically low-performing schools might improve education in Milwaukee and circumvent the fractious debate over mayoral control, said the chairman of the Senate Education Committee on Tuesday.
Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine) said the education committee took executive action Tuesday to introduce the bill, which Lehman requested be tweaked from an earlier version to zero in on the state superintendent’s attention to a handful of schools in MPS.
A similar bill that passed the Assembly’s education committee earlier this fall was not as specific about what qualified as a low-performing school.
“The state superintendent powers bill has not seen the same kind of ‘draw a line and plant your feet firmly in the sand and don’t move’ that mayoral control has seen,” Lehman said. “The state superintendent powers bill is more about turning to thoughtful public policy on this to see what we can do for Milwaukee Public Schools.”
o, what’s a coastie?
Chances are until this fall, most folks, even in Madison where the term appears to have originated, would have told you it’s one of two things:
Anyone not from around here.
Or, a privileged East or West Coast transplant, often a woman of a certain look: black tights, Ugg boots, oversize sunglasses and sporting a Starbucks cup.
Now a song and music video out of Madison suggest she’s all of that, and Jewish, provoking debates in and out of the classroom over stereotyping, anti-Semitism and the boundaries of humor.
Most of the Jewish students interviewed for this story said they find the tune and video “What’s a Coastie” by UW-Madison undergrads Cliff Grefe and Quincy Harrison – who are not Jewish – harmless and funny.
But some are offended.
“The song went too far,” said Nicole Halpern, a 19-year-old sophomore from New Jersey who describes herself as “technically a coastie.”
As Seattle Public Schools released new details about its latest transformation plan for perpetually-troubled Cleveland High School over the past week, there’s been a collective eye roll among some teachers there.
“I’ve been here for 15 years and every other year we do this,” says math teacher David Fisher, referring to a long string of ballyhooed overhauls that the Beacon Hill school has embarked on at the behest of the district.
One thing is different: The district is promising to pour money into this reinvention of Cleveland as the School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). It proposes to spend more than $4 million over the first three years, according to a report at last Wednesday’s school board meeting by Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson. That’s a lot of money for a school that is already up and running. (See the breakdown of spending on page 8 of this pdf.)
[Milwaukee…] Wisconsin State Senator Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) proclaims that if her bill giving the mayor of Milwaukee control of Milwaukee’s Public Schools comes up in Special Session this week, it will pass the State Senate.
“I believe if the bill comes to the floor in the Senate, it’s going to pass,” Taylor said in an exclusive interview with the MacIver News Service. “I don’t hesitate on that.”
Taylor’s bill, co-authored by Rep. Pedro Colon, (D-Milwaukee) is the result of a compromise between legislative supporters, the mayor and the governor. It grants the mayor authority over MPS and allows him him to pick the superintendent. City residents would still be allowed to elect the school board, but many of its powers would be transferred to the superintendent. Current Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett originally wanted the ability to appoint the school board himself.
Some of Taylor’s Democratic colleagues from Milwaukee are opposed to her proposal. Two of them, Milwaukee Senator Spencer Coggs and Representative Tamara Grigsby, recently announced their own proposal, which would allow the mayor more say in MPS, but their plan stops short of handing over full control of the district. The Coggs-Grigsby plan has the support of the teachers’ union and several prominent community activists.
I occasionally communicate with Montgomery County school superintendent Jerry D. Weast, but usually it is one of his people who call to set up the appointment. Yesterday he was so bothered about something he called himself. It wasn’t me who upset him, but my friends and fellow members in good standing of the School Ranking Scoundrels club, the editors of U.S. News & World Report.
They just came out with their latest list of America’s Best High Schools. Weast was astonished to see that none of the three Montgomery County schools that had been on the U.S. News top 100 list in the past were mentioned this time. In fact there were no Maryland, Virginia or D.C. schools on the list at all, except for Langley, number 47, and the Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in Fairfax County which was, as usual, number one in the country.
Weast wanted me to find out from U.S. News why this was. I told him I thought it was better if he contacted the magazine himself, and gave him the email address of the U.S. News director of data research, Robert Morse, whose work for the last several decades, beginning with the magazine’s America’s Best Colleges list, I highly admire.
I am uncomfortable saying more about this, because of my personal involvement in rating high schools. I invented and still produce each year Newsweek’s America’s Top High Schools list. That list started a decade before the U.S. News list, and rates schools in a somewhat different way, although many schools appear on both lists. I exclude very selective schools like Jefferson from my list, but include about 70 percent of Washington area schools, including every school in Montgomery County, based on their students’ participation rates in college level exams like Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate.
My wife was enjoying a quiet flight back to Washington after a week off in California when I, sitting next to her, started thrashing around. I was reading a book, but in a way that any person would find disturbing. I was marking and remarking pages. I was filling margins with unreadable scrawls. I was flipping back and forth. I was talking to myself: “Whoa! No! Yes!”
“What is that?” she asked.
It’s a good question. The simple answer is: the latest book by school improvement activist Tony Wagner: “The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need.” Wagner is co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also a great writer and speaker. I consider this book more of an experience than a read.
My habit is to write on the last page, next to the inside of the back cover, any column ideas that come to me from a book. The last page of my copy of Wagner’s book is a maze of my jottings. I have been making fun of the 21st century skills movement as a high-cost, high-level, often incomprehensible conversation among people who have forgotten to explain what it means to teachers.
ON THE surface, Framingham, Massachusetts looks like any other American town. Unbeknown to most who pass through this serene place, however, it is a gold mine for medical research. Since 1948 three generations of residents in Framingham have participated in regular medical examinations originally intended to study the spread of heart disease. In the years since, researchers have also used Framingham to track obesity, smoking and even happiness over long periods of time. Now a new study that uses Framingham to analyse loneliness has found that it spreads very much like a communicable disease.
Feeling lonely is more than just unpleasant for those who yearn to be surrounded by warm relationships–it is a health hazard. Numerous studies show that loneliness reduces fruit-fly lifespans, increases the chances of mice developing diabetes, and causes a host of adverse effects in people, including cardiovascular disease, obesity and weakening of the immune system. Simply being surrounded by others is no cure. In people, the mere perception of being isolated is more than enough to create the bad health effects. However, in spite of its significant impact, precious little is known about how loneliness moves through communities.
Public schools across the country are trying to figure out how to manage with shrinking budgets. School districts are increasing class size, firing teachers, and cutting art programs and field trips. Some districts have gone as far to try a four-day school week.
School districts can save money by parking their buses for three days.
Last week, the four-day week was a hot topic in Oklahoma media as the state now has four districts that have dropped a day from the traditional school week. Mostly rural school systems in at least 10 other states have made the switch to save money: Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Arkansas, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming, according to the LA Times.
The increasing number of districts changing over to the new schedule is no surprise. Last year, the American Association of School Administrators surveyed school boards and found that 1 in 7 boards nationwide was considering whether to drop a day, according to Time.
San Francisco Unified School District is not a district that has considered the four-day schedule. “In my year on the board, the idea of a four-day school week has never even been remotely mentioned as an option,” says board member Rachel Norton. “In fact, I’d be shocked to hear if it had ever been mentioned in recent memory! To my mind, the four-day school week would be tremendously difficult for families, and I can’t imagine that teachers and other school staff would consider cutting a day of school to be a good option, not when all of the research says that more, rather than less, school is what our children need.”
Another school-violence crisis is unfolding in Philadelphia’s public schools. Asian American students at South Philadelphia High School felt they had to boycott classes to bring attention to a reign of terror by violent kids and an indifferent staff. State officials, who run the district in a “reform partnership” with city leaders, have responded with a deafening silence.
When the state Department of Education closed Philadelphia’s Office of the Safe Schools Advocate last summer for supposed want of chump change in its multibillion-dollar budget, officials said the city’s school-violence victims need not worry: Unnamed Harrisburg bureaucrats would protect them. A more hollow promise was never made.
Last year, state Auditor General Jack Wagner confirmed that the department had violated state law since 1995 by failing to establish a safe-schools office to gather violence data from all 501 of the state’s school districts and to address safety issues. Instead, the department has reported false data to the public for years. For example, the Philadelphia School District habitually and significantly underreported school violence until 2005, when investigations by The Inquirer and the safe-schools advocate revealed the truth.
The Milwaukee School Board has spent 20 years ignoring a “fiscal time bomb” in the form of generous and unfunded health insurance benefits for retired MPS teachers and staff that will cost the district $5 billion by 2016, according to a new report by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.
On Monday, the president of the conservative institute that conducted the report, George Lightbourn, said the study raises serious questions about the School Board’s ability to provide financial oversight of the district and that it lends support to changing the governance structure of MPS.
The report comes in the same week that the Legislature is expected to convene a special session to consider a bill that would give the Milwaukee mayor power to appoint a superintendent and authority over the district’s budget.
“Even if the mayor took over (the school system), the mayor would have to deal with this thing,” Lightbourn said. “But it’s more likely that somebody who has a different approach to this might actually look at this and if nothing else say: ‘We have to slow down these costs.’ ”
Over the past year alone, the public debt of the United States rose sharply from 41 to 53 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Under reasonable assumptions, the debt is projected to grow steadily, reaching 85 percent of GDP by 2018, 100 percent by 2022, and 200 percent in 2038.
However, before the debt reached such high levels, the United States would almost certainly experience a debt- driven crisis–something previously viewed as almost unfathomable in the world’s largest economy. The crisis could unfold gradually or it could happen suddenly, but with great costs either way. The tipping point is impossible to predict, but the United States is already hearing con- cerns about its fiscal management from some of its largest creditors, and the country is uncomfortably vulnerable to shifts in confidence around the world.
Wisconsin ranks 10th amongst the States in State-Local debt service. Exploding debt levels mean that it is highly unlikely school districts will see significant new revenues. Like many organizations, they must change and spend precious dollars where most needed and automate elsewhere (virtual learning tools are a natural, as this post demonstrates).
Improving teacher effectiveness is hgh on the list of most education reformers in colorado, as it is nationally. Effective teaching in the elementary years is of vital importance to ensure not only that children master fundamental skills, but that performance gaps narrow rather than widen beyond repair. We now know that disadvantaged students can catch up academically with their more advantaged peers if they have great elementary teachers several years in a row.
It is for these reasons that the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a nonpartisan research and advocacy group dedicated to the systemic reform of the teaching profession, evaluates the adequacy of preparation provided by undergraduate education schools. These programs produce 70 percent of our nation’s teachers. We think it is crucial to focus specifically on the quality of preparation of future elementary teachers in the core subjects of reading and mathematics.
Teacher preparation programs, or “ed schools” as they are more commonly known, do not now, nor have they ever, enjoyed a particularly positive reputation. Further, there is a growing body of research demonstrating that teacher preparation does not matter all that much and that a teacher with very little training can be as effective as a teacher who has had a lot of preparation. As a result, many education reformers are proposing that the solution to achieving better teacher quality is simply to attract more talented people into teaching, given that their preparation does not really matter.
In several significant ways, we respectfully disagree. NCTQ is deeply committed to high-quality formal teacher preparation, but, importantly, we are not defenders of the status quo. We also do not believe that it is a realistic strategy to fuel a profession with three million members nationally by only attracting more elite students. Yes, we need to be much more selective about who gets into teaching, and we strenuously advocate for that goal. But even smart people can become better teachers, particularly of young children, if they are provided with purposeful and systematic preparation.
NCTQ has issued two national reports on the reading and mathematics preparation of elementary teachers in undergraduate education schools. The first, What Education Schools Aren’t Teaching about Reading and What Elementary Teachers Aren’t Learning was released in May 2006.1 The second, No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America’s Education Schools, followed just over two years later.2 These reports provide the methodological foundations for this analysis of teacher preparation in every undergraduate program in Colorado.
What wouldn’t California do for $700 million right now? That’s not a rhetorical question. With U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan parceling out more than $4 billion to states that conform to his vision of school reform, California’s Legislature is just one of dozens that are frantically revamping their states’ education systems for some of that cash. Should California succeed, its share would be somewhere between $350 million and $700 million.
To obtain the money, Sacramento must pass legislation that would serve as the basis for an application. This has given Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a perfect opportunity to push for more parent choice and fewer restrictions on charter schools, while the teachers unions have pushed an agenda that would handcuff the charter movement. There is some merit to both sides’ proposals — charter schools should be more accountable, and parents should have more say in the education process — but they have been poorly executed in ways that could have negative repercussions. Applications for Duncan’s “Race to the Top” grants are due in January, so who has time for a thoughtful debate?
Today, all available data indicates that students of color are “much more likely than white students to fall behind in math and science courses, drop-out, and much less likely to graduate from high school, acquire a college or advanced degree, or earn a middle-class living.” Even though data cites numerous factors contributing to the achievement gap, it failed to include the most important factors such as lack of culture-inclusive curriculum, and lack of teachers’ knowledge, skills, and desire to teach non-European contributions and accomplishments in all areas of human endeavor to all learners, especially to students of color.
In my opinion, the achievement gap cannot be closed until we close the knowledge gap about various ethnic groups we teach. The gap will persist as long as we continue teaching the way we have been teaching for nearly 400 years.
During the years Salman Khan spent scrutinizing financials for hedge funds, he rationalized the profit-obsessed work by telling himself he would one day quit and use his market winnings to open a free school.
It began with long-distance tutoring in late 2004. He agreed to help his niece Nadia, then a seventh-grader struggling with unit conversion, by providing math lessons over Yahoo’s interactive notepad, Doodle, and the phone.
Nephews and family friends soon followed. But scheduling conflicts and repeated lectures prompted him to post instructional videos on YouTube that his proliferating pupils could watch when they had the time.
They did – and before long, so did thousands of others. Today, the Mountain View resident’s 800-plus videos are viewed about 35,000 times a day, forming a virtual classroom that dwarfs any brick and mortar school he might have imagined. By using the reach of the Internet, he’s helped bring education to the information-hungry around the world who can’t afford private tutors or Kaplan prep courses.
The neediest students in California high schools are being taught by the least prepared teachers, a new study shows.
Fewer than half the principals in high-poverty schools said their teachers had the skills to encourage critical thinking and problem-solving among their students, while more than two-thirds of their counterparts in wealthier communities said their teachers possessed those abilities, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning said in a study being released today.
The nonprofit center also found that teachers in the lowest-performing schools are more than twice as likely as those in the highest-achieving schools to be working without at least a preliminary credential.
The center’s study, “The Status of the Teaching Profession 2009,” is the latest to show that the most disadvantaged students don’t have access to the same quality of teaching as those in more affluent, high-achieving schools.
The number of outside applicants being offered a seat would drop at nearly every Chicago magnet school next year under new admissions criteria to be voted on Wednesday, according to a Tribune analysis.
By giving greater priority to siblings of current students and applicants who live within 1 1/2 miles of each magnet school, the policy could reduce the offers extended to other applicants by about 14 percent overall.
In some schools, the reduction is far greater. At Drummond Elementary, where the acceptance rate hovers around 3 percent, offers to students outside the neighborhood would drop almost 55 percent. At Black Magnet on the South Side, where just 1 in 10 students is accepted, 32 percent of the offers would dry up.
Some observers say the policy will undermine the essence of magnets, which were created nearly 30 years ago to integrate schools in the nation’s most segregated large city. By raising the number of students from the neighborhood who can attend, magnets once meant for all public school kids would increasingly become de facto neighborhood schools.
Vista school trustees are seeking reimbursement from the teachers union for about $128,000 in salary payments made to the union’s president over the past three years.
Under a 1995 agreement, the Vista Unified School District has been paying for the union president’s salary, even though that person is on leave from the classroom. In exchange, the union has paid the salary of a replacement teacher, who invariably is on a lower pay scale. As a result, the school district has paid more money to the union than the union has returned to the district.
A court decision last year found that state education laws require school district unions to reimburse school districts for all salary payments they make to union presidents on leave from the classroom, said Myrna Vallely, assistant superintendent for human resources at Vista Unified.
I am a proud graduate of Montgomery’s public schools, and my progression from the railroad tracks in west Montgomery to the halls of Congress proves that education can transform lives. As governor I will do everything in my power to build a public school system that gives our children the chance to cross the bridge that I have walked.
The next governor of Alabama will need to launch a decade-long effort to revitalize public education. In a century where Alabama’s workers must compete globally, we can no longer afford to sit near the bottom of national categories that rank college affordability and high school graduation rates. We cannot be afraid of reform and we cannot dismiss the possibility that new ideas can work.
I will make it a priority to strengthen Alabama’s nationally recognized early learning programs. Our pre-kindergarten program is an Alabama success story, and many more children in our state should have access to it. Similarly, the Alabama Reading Initiative, which helped produce the biggest jump in fourth-grade reading performance in the country, must be broadened to reach middle school and above.
Dear Editor: In the article “Racial Divide,” you quote the Madison School District’s Kurt Kiefer as saying “We celebrate the high fliers” and state that Madison has 57 National Merit semifinalists this year.
But did we “celebrate” them? Two were named last week in the Wisconsin State Journal, and they were named because of their disabilities. I could not find reference to the other 55 on the school district’s website. (By searching madison.com archives, I did find a list of 62 from September, including private school students.) How many high school athletes did we celebrate this week, by posting their names, their accomplishments, and their pictures in the paper?
The State Journal names a male and female athlete of the week, and runs a feature story. When did we name a scholar of the week? A thespian? A musician? Do we cover the State Solo and Ensemble Competition as though it were newsworthy? How about math meets? Debate and forensics? Do we review high school plays with the same attention as weekly football games?
When academic and artistic pursuits are covered with even a quarter of the vigor with which we cover sports, when students of color are served by the district as gifted in fields other than athletics, when we let students know in a public way that we value them for those gifts and that hard work, then we can begin to talk about celebrating the high fliers, and then we can begin to scratch our heads about an achievement gap.
When we send the clear message to students, especially students of color, that they are of value to society for their entertainment value on an athletic field, we do not serve them or us.
Steve Rankin
Madison
The Washington, D.C., public school system, with its high dropout rates and low test scores, has long been a national embarrassment. But things seem to be improving under maverick Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. So it’s curious that the White House hasn’t done more to support her reform efforts, especially since they track so closely with the Obama Administration’s own stated education goals.
New student test scores released by the U.S. Department of Education last week showed that Washington’s fourth-graders made the largest gains in math among big city school systems in the past two years. D.C.’s eighth-graders increased their math proficiency at a faster rate than all other big cities save San Diego. Washington still has a long way to go, but it’s no longer the city with the lowest marks, a distinction that now belongs to Detroit.
Before Ms. Rhee’s arrival, the nation’s capital went through six superintendents in 10 years. Since taking over as Chancellor in 2007, Ms. Rhee has replaced ineffective principals, laid off instructors based on “quality, not by seniority” and shuttered failing schools. These actions have angered teacher unions to the point of bringing (unsuccessful) lawsuits, yet academic outcomes are clearly improving.
Author Beth Fertig says that as many as 20 percent of American adults may be functionally illiterate. They may recognize letters and words, but can’t read directions on a bus sign or a medicine bottle, read or write a letter, or hold most any job. Her new book, Why cant U teach me 2 read, follows three young New Yorkers who legally challenged the New York City public schools for failing to teach them how to read — and won. Host Scott Simon talks to Fertig about her book.
….
SIMON: The No Child Left Behind Act is often criticized. But you suggest in this book that it perhaps did force teachers to not just let a certain percentage of students slip through the cracks.
Ms. FERTIG: That is the one thing that I do hear from a lot of different people is, by not just looking at how a whole school did and saying, you know, 60 or 70 percent of our kids passed the test, they now have to look at how did our Hispanic kids do, how did our black students do, how did our special ed students do, how did English language learners do – students who aren’t born to parent who speak English.
And this way, by just aggregating the data, they’re able to see which kids are falling behind and hopefully target them and give them more interventions, more help with their reading. And the ideal is that a child like Umilka isn’t going to be caught, you know, in high school and they’re going to figure out then that they weren’t reading.
SIMON: You make a point in the book you can’t get a job cracking rocks these days without having to probably fill out a computer form as to how many rocks you cracked.
Ms. FERTIG: Exactly. Antonio is now working at UPS as a loader. He had to take a basic orientation test. And because he had improved his reading skills to a fourth or fifth grade level, he was able to pass that. But he feels stuck now.
With the last of the official announcements of the schools targeted for closure by Chancellor Klein, the final grim toll can be tallied. An unprecedented twenty-one schools have been told that the Department of Education will begin their phase out in September 2010. Fifteen of those schools — a completely disproportionate number — were high schools.*
With this wide swath of devastation, there can be no illusion that this is a process based on an educational calculus. The evidence simply tells a very different story: the Chancellor could not close significant numbers of Elementary and Middle Schools, once 97% of them scored A and B on School Progress Reports that so heavily weighted the wildly inflated and broken state exams. So Klein decided that to reach his targets, he would close high schools in much larger numbers. Among the high schools slated for closure are schools which are in good standing with the New York State Education Department and schools which are meeting their Annual Yearly Progress benchmarks under No Child Left Behind, as well as a school which just received the school-wide bonus. The list includes schools which never received a School Progress grade lower than C, and schools which actually improved on every measure in the School Progress Reports.
Why take a machete to New York City public high schools in this way? The reason is not difficult to decipher. The Chancellor needs a great deal of space in public school buildings to pursue his political and ideological agenda of creating and supporting new charter schools and new DoE schools. Since it had become politically untenable to create that space by closing large numbers of elementary and middle schools, the space would have to be found in high schools.
A handful of states have moved to restrict or regulate school staff members who restrain or seclude hard-to-handle children against their will in the wake of abuses exposed by congressional investigators seven months ago. But many more states have done little or nothing, advocates say.
“There has been a lot of attention, a lot of advocacy, a lot of family members involved, but it’s slow going,” says Jane Hudson, an attorney for the National Disability Rights Network, based in Washington, D.C.
Many states still have no rules in place to address how and when school staff can restrain and seclude children, says Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. So he and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., also on the committee, are pushing legislation to set federal rules.
“Without a federal standard to set the bar, it’s the Wild West,” Miller says. “We believe the right approach is a balanced one that provides federal guidance to states but still allows states the flexibility to tailor their regulations to their specific needs.”
MBJ: As superintendent, you are the CEO of a $311 million budget, 32,000 students and 4,500 employees. What are your priorities? Thompson: Basically, moving the school district forward so we are considered one of the No. 1 school districts in the state. Making sure that our students are successful and that they have skills that will allow them to compete in what I consider a global society. My priority is to make sure first and foremost that we have kids in the classroom – so we have to tackle that dropout rate. MBJ: Any other initiatives? Thompson: The Career Academies is another way we’re looking at deterring our dropout rate. We hope that this gives our kids some idea of the light at the end of the tunnel; some skill set they can see and some jobs they can do. Potentially, we see (Career Academies) being a linkage for those kids for reasons why to stay in school because this can give you jobs – these are classes you can take while you’re in high school so when you graduate, you actually have a job. And the last component of that – that three-tier component that I consider — is prevention. We increased seven pre-K programs because the other part of dropout prevention is that part. We added seven pre-K programs this year for a total of 21. The reason that is so critical is because one of the reasons kids drop out is because they don’t have the skills that they need. We’re trying to increase giving the kids skills as 4-year-olds so when they come into kindergarten, they are caught up. That’s part of that three-pronged approach.
MBJ: What are some of the things that you learned about MPS since you took over in August, and what has surprised you?
Thompson: I learned a lot about the commitment that this community has towards education, particularly the business (community), work force development and the chamber. They are very committed to making sure that the public schools in Montgomery are successful. I guess I was surprised at the Career Academies. They are cutting-edge in terms of what you want to be doing in the school district and the involvement that we have in the chamber in the (Career Academies) is exciting and unusual.
Click for a Reading Recovery Data Summary from Madison’s Elementary Schools. December 2009
Madison School Board 24MB mp3 audio file. Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad’s December 10, 2009 memorandum [311K PDF] to the board in response to the 12/7/2009 meeting:
Attached to this memo are several items related to further explanation of the reason why full implementation is more effective for Reading Recovery and what will happen to the schools who would no longer receive Reading Recovery as part of the administrative recommendation. There are three options for your review:
Option I: Continue serving the 23 schools with modifications.
Option II: Reading Recovery Full Implementation at Title I schools and Non-Title I Schools.
Option III: Serving some students in all or a majority of schools, not just the 23 schools who are currently served.
The first attachment is a one-page overview summary ofthe MMSD Comprehensive Literacy Model. It explains the Balanced Literacy Model used in all MMSD elementary schools. It also provides an explanation of the wrap around services to support each school through the use of an Instructional Resource Teacher as well as Tier II and Tier III interventions common in all schools.
The second attachment shows the detailed K-5 Title I Reading Curriculum Description in which MMSD uses four programs in Title I schools: Rock and Read, Reading Recovery, Apprenticeship, and Soar to Success. As part of our recommendation, professional development will be provided in all elementary schools to enable all teachers to use these programs. Beginning in Kindergarten, the four instructional interventions support and develop students’ reading and writing skills in order to meet grade level proficiency with a focus on the most intensive and individualized wrap around support in Kindergarten and I” Grade with follow up support through fifth grade.
Currently these interventions are almost solely used in Title I schools.
The third attachment contains three sheets – the frrst for Reading Recovery Full Implementation at Title I schools, the second for No Reading Recovery – at Title I Schools, and the third for No Reading Recovery and No Title I eligibility. In this model we would intensify Reading Recovery in a limited number of schools (14 schools) and provide professional development to support teachers in providing small group interventions to struggling students.
The fourth attachment is a chart of all schools, students at risk and students with the highest probability of success in Reading Recovery for the 2009-10 school year. This chart may be used if Reading Recovery would be distributed based on student eligibility (districtwide lowest 20% of students in f rst grade) and school eligibility (based on the highest number of students in need per school).
Option I: Leave Reading Recovery as it currently is, in the 23 schools, but target students more strategically and make sure readiness is in place before the Reading Recovery intervention.
At the most recent meeting on Dec. 7, the school board heard a final presentation from New Century School’s site council. Developments with New Century’s charter renewal are reaching a critical point, since we need approval from the school board by early January to participate in kindergarten recruitment. New Century is one of Wisconsin’s oldest charter schools (established in May 1995), and our school community is fighting for the charter’s continued existence. It’s been a challenging journey.
Click “video” for the December 7, 2009 meeting and look for “D”, the New Century Presentation. Interestingly, “E” is a presentation on a proposed Chinese immersion charter school.
Unfortunately, Madison lacks significant charter activity, something which, in my view, would be very beneficial to the community, students and parents.
So far this school year, the approximately 100 school districts that have reached agreements with their teachers have average settlements that increase salaries and benefits by 3.75%, according to Bob Butler, staff counsel for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. That compares with an average total compensation increase of 4.11% for teachers in the 2008-’09 school year.
Given that settlements tend to go down the longer negotiations take, Butler said the average increases for 2009-’10 and 2010-’11 are likely to be below what they have been in the past and what was considered a minimum settlement under the QEO law.
The recession, even in growing and financially stable districts, is the main reason behind the settlement drops, Butler said. Even though the Legislature removed the QEO salary restrictions, it left revenue limits in place so that any increase in teacher compensation almost certainly means staff cuts, he said.
In addition, facing pressure from taxpayers, some school districts, such as Whitnall, refused to enact a tax levy up to their state-imposed revenue limits this year.
“We have seen such a drastic reduction in the amount of money we have coming in from the state, it would have been hard to settle at 3.8% even if the QEO still stood there,” Whitnall School Board President Bill Osterndorf said.
As many as three-quarters of state schools are failing to push their brightest pupils because teachers are reluctant to promote ‘elitism’, an Ofsted study says today.
Many teachers are not convinced of the importance of providing more challenging tasks for their gifted and talented pupils.
Bright youngsters told inspectors they were forced to ask for harder work. Others were resentful at being dragooned into ‘mentoring’ weaker pupils.
In nearly three-quarters of 26 schools studied, pupils designated as being academically gifted or talented in sport or the arts were ‘not a priority’, Ofsted found.
Teachers feared that a focus on the brightest pupils would ‘undermine the school’s efforts to improve the attainment and progress of all other groups of pupils’.
New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.
Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?
The questions go beyond the psychological impact on Medicaid children, serious as that may be. Antipsychotic drugs can also have severe physical side effects, causing drastic weight gain and metabolic changes resulting in lifelong physical problems.
I give William Andrekopoulos credit – the school superintendent has invited outside scrutiny of what’s going on in Milwaukee Public Schools, and he hasn’t flinched when that has brought bad news time after time.
He says it takes courage to do this, and, especially compared with the mealy-mouthed way lots of executives in public and private businesses act, he’s right.
“If you don’t put the truth on the table . . . there will never be a sense of urgency to improve,” he said in a phone conversation. He said he wants his successor – whom the School Board is on pace to pick soon – to have a clear understanding of what the score is.
So here’s some of the score:
In 2006, Andrekopoulos invites the Council of the Great City Schools, a professional organization for big city school administrators, to assess the education program in MPS. The result: A report that is strongly critical, saying efforts in city schools are a hodgepodge of practices, many of them weak. The report also says there is a pervasive lack of urgency about getting better results in MPS.
School property tax levies for 2009-10 are up 6.0%, from $4.28 billion last year to $4.54 billion this year, according to the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX), a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. The rise in school taxes exceeded last year’s increase of 5.2%, due principally to state budget cuts in aid to K-12 schools.
According to WISTAX, tax changes ranged from increases of 41.2% in Seneca and 32.8% in Gilmanton to reductions of more than 19% in Ladysmith and Sharon J1. However, increases larger than those in prior years were the norm, and 116 districts (27%) of the state’s 425 districts had increases of 10% or more. In another 151 districts, levies were up between 5% and 10%. Only 42 districts cut property taxes.
“Although state budget reductions and tighter school revenue limits have made the headlines,” noted WISTAX President Todd A. Berry, “the more telling stories are coming from budget details.”
For example, schools raised their general fund levies more than 8%, well above the overall 6% increase. They pared back the overall increases by retiring or refinancing debt and by rearranging expenditures formerly charged to a little-known fund exempt from state revenue limits: fund 80, or the community services fund. This fall, 78 of 425 districts trimmed community service levies that fund such items as community recreation and adult classes; 10 districts eliminated the tax altogether. These actions served to reduce what would otherwise have been an 8.2% tax increase.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett would have more power over the Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent and budget than nearly any other U.S. mayor holds over a big-city school system, under a bill the Legislature is to consider Wednesday.
“If they go ahead with the present plan, it will make for one of the most powerful education mayors in the country,” said Joe Viteritti, a professor of public policy at Hunter College who led a commission to study mayoral control in New York City and has edited a book, “When Mayors Take Charge.”
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee), would allow the mayor to appoint the superintendent without confirmation by the School Board or Common Council, and would let the superintendent set the school budget and tax levy without a vote by the board or council.
Elected School Board members – who now select the superintendent and approve the budget – would be limited to an advisory role on the budget and would control only such functions as student discipline, community outreach and adult recreation.
Nick Gillespie pointed earlier to the latest evidence that federal workers have long since lapped their private sector benefactors in salary and job growth, in addition to their traditional advantages in job security and benefits. (Fun fact! Back in February 2008, before Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and George W. Bush’s disaster socialism, The New York Times reported that Dubya was “in line to be the first president since World War II to preside over an economy in which federal government employment rose more rapidly than employment in the private sector.”)
Here’s an anecdotal sign that conventional wisdom is turning against those who are using the guaranteed revenue stream of tax dollars to pad their paychecks and pensions: A scathing piece from L.A. Times metro columnist Steve Lopez. Excerpt:
A reader sent me a posting for an executive secretary position at the [Department of Water and Power], and the salary range is $68,089 to $97,864, with great benefits. […]
I checked with the personnel department and found that the same position in other city departments starts at $54,000 and ranges up to $72,000.
Something big needs to happen with Milwaukee Public Schools to boost student performance and graduation rates.
And Gov. Jim Doyle’s push to give the city’s mayor more influence is worth a shot.
The Legislature should accept Doyle’s call for a special floor session this week to change how Milwaukee chooses its school superintendent.
Doyle wants the city’s mayor, rather than the Milwaukee School Board, to appoint the superintendent. In addition, Senate Bill 405 would give the superintendent more power over the district’s budget, contracts and staff.
If city voters didn’t like the results by 2017, they could change back to the current system through a binding referendum.
The Legislature is already planning to meet this week to OK tougher drunken driving laws. So it can easily take up SB 405 as well. The bill needs quick action to help Wisconsin compete for federal “Race to the Top” innovation grants.
A flood of emails Monday resisting my suggestion of longer school days to raise achievement leads me to wonder if parts of the regular school day could be put to better use. Is the typical raucous high school lunch period, in an overcrowded and sometimes dangerous cafeteria, really necessary? My colleague Jenna Johnson wrote last week of imaginative principals letting students avoid the cafeteria in favor of staying in classrooms to catch up with work or having club meetings. Can lunch become a time for stress-free learning, rather than Lord of the Flies with tile floors?
Okay, I confess I have long considered lunch a waste of time. I avoided the cafeteria during high school. My favorite lunch was eating a sandwich in a classroom while convening the student court, of which I was chief justice, so we could sanction some miscreant for stealing corn nuts from the vending machine. (I heard a radio ad for that classmate’s business when I was home recently—he has become a successful attorney.) At the office these days I stay in my cubicle and have crackers and fruit juice, maybe a cookie if somebody has brought them from home.
We looked at more than 21,000 public high schools in 48 states and the District of Columbia. The following are the 100 schools that performed the best in our three-step America’s Best High Schools ranking analysis.
Kenneth Terrell:
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., the top school in U.S. News & World Report’s America’s Best High Schools rankings, is designed to challenge students. A course load of offerings that include DNA science, neurology, and quantum physics would seem to be more than enough to meet that goal. But students and the faculty felt those classes weren’t enough, so they decided to tackle another big question: What are the social responsibilities of educated people? Over the course of the school year, students are exploring social responsibility through projects of their own design, ranging from getting school supplies for students with cerebral palsy in Shanghai to persuading their classmates to use handkerchiefs to reduce paper waste. The One Question project demonstrates the way “TJ,” as it’s referred to by students and teachers, encourages the wide-ranging interests of its students.
“None of our students has the same passion,” says TJ Principal Evan Glazer. “But having a passion is widely accepted and embraced.”
This enthusiasm has placed TJ at the top of the America’s Best High Schools ranking for each of the three years that U.S. News has ranked high schools. U.S. News uses a three-step process that analyzes first how schools are educating all of their students, then their minority and disadvantaged students, and finally their collegebound students based on student scores on statewide tests, Advanced Placement tests, and International Baccalaureate tests.
Warm wishes this winter season!
Thank you for your continued participation in the Read On Wisconsin! book club. We had a fantastic semester traveling to classrooms across Wisconsin and inviting numerous classes and authors to the Executive Residence for Reading Days.
Throughout the fall, we spoke to elementary, middle, and high school students about the importance of reading and suggesting the excellent books chosen by the Literacy Advisory Committee. Three Cups of Tea: The Young Reader’s Edition by Greg Mortenson has been one of our most popular choices and has connected so many students and staff with community service. (You can learn more at: www.penniesforpeace.org.)
We have held very successful Reading Days at the Residence. In November, we welcomed three authors: Rachna Gilmore (Group of One), Sylviane Diouf (Bintou’s Braids), and James Rumford (Silent Music). Each of these authors shared their enthusiasm for writing and answered many student questions about their international experiences.
Our next Reading Day will be: Thursday, January 21, 2010 from 9:00 – 2:30. At our January Reading Day, we will welcome John Coy, the author of our high school selection, Box Out. This book shares a courageous story of a high school basketball player who speaks up against an unconstitutional act occurring at his school. Box Out reaches all students. We are seeking five middle or high school classes for this Reading Day.
Please e-mail Ashley Huibregtse at ashley.huibregtse@wisconsin.gov or call 608-575-5608 to reserve your middle or high school group a spot in the schedule. Each class will be scheduled for one hour. Please share your time preference when you call or e-mail. Remember we offer bus reimbursement up to $100 to help with transportation costs if needed.
E-mail or call today! This will be an exciting Reading Day to start 2010! All the best for a happy holiday season, and Read On!
Sincerely,
Jessica and Ashley
lexandria School Superintendent Mort Sherman has discovered that the city’s gifted education program needs revision. Sherman likes to poke at beehives. Few issues inspire as much angry mail as changing gifted programs. He wants to find ways to get more black and Hispanic kids into the program, but if I were he, I would go much further than that.
Start with the story of one particularly troublesome Washington area gifted child, Warren Buffett, as described in the biography “The Snowball,” by Alice Schroeder. By age 13, Buffett, later to be the richest man in the world and a Washington Post Co. board member, had had it with school. I wonder whether it might have been better if his parents had let him quit right then.
At newspaper gatherings, Buffett sometimes mentions the Washington Post paper route he had as a boy. It sounds quaint and charming, until you read the book and discover that the kid had so many routes that his annual income (including proceeds from his tenant farm and other investments) was greater than that of his teachers at Deal Junior High and Wilson High in the District. His father was a congressman. His family was comfortable. But he had made all that money himself as a boy genius entrepreneur. By age 14, he had filed his first tax return.
Lt. Governor John Cherry this afternoon proposed using Michigan’s water supply to fund its education system.
More specifically, businesses that make a profit by selling Michigan’s water should pay a fee of 10 cents per bottle. That money, in turn, could replace the recently-dismantled Promise Scholarship, Cherry said.
He said the state’s two most precious natural resources — its people and its water — are being depleted.
“We are losing one resource — our talented work force and the energy of our young people, and we are giving away another resource — our water — for free,” he said. “You don’t need a PhD in mathematics to know this is a terrible equation.”
“It’s time for the bottlers to pay their water bill, just like you and I do,” he said.
Cherry was speaking at the University of Michigan on a panel discussing the 2004 report that made 19 recommendations on education reform in Michigan.
Like many other principals across the city, Edward Tom has developed something of a nervous habit. Each morning, when he switches on his computer at the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics, he checks to make sure his school has the same amount of money it had the night before.
Mr. Tom is not a principal one would normally suspect of anxiety. Eighty-three percent of the students in the senior class at his small South Bronx high school graduated this spring, well above the 52 percent borough average. More than three-quarters of them enrolled in four-year colleges, winning $3 million in scholarships.
“These are the students people said couldn’t learn,” Mr. Tom, who has been principal since the school opened in 2005, said proudly.
But budget cuts are coming, even if it is too soon to say exactly when and how much. Most city agencies have been asked to submit plans for cost savings; the Department of Education has been asked to prepare for a 1.5 percent midyear cut and a 4 percent cut for next autumn’s entering class.
While it is not known how much individual schools will be asked to shave, principals like Mr. Tom are preparing for the worst. It is part of their role, since 2007, of managing a large portion of their own operating budgets.
In a majority of schools around the country mobile phones/devices are locked away or ‘banned’ from use as they are perceived as a distraction or danger. The premise of this study is to see how mobile technologies can be used as a tool for learning within schools, by both staff and students.
30 students have been given the loan of an iPhone 3GS until then end of the academic year. They will be able to use these devices as part of their every day lessons in school and use them in whichever way they feel will aid their learning, working closely with their teachers. The increasing availability of ‘apps’ (applications) on these phones means that a wealth of possibilities may be accessed, and the group involved in the study will meet at regular intervals to share ideas on how they are being used as well as look at their regular attainment to see if, in reality, and change in learning can be monitored.
Americans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are amazed at how poor these places are, and how difficult it is to make a living. On top of that, there are lots of children, who are destined to be even less well off than their parents. This is one reason for Islamic terrorism. There are too many Moslems. At least in the sense that the economies of Islamic countries cannot create enough jobs for all the young people coming of age. Consider that for the last fifty years, the population of all Moslem countries has tripled. That’s population growth that is more than double the rate of the world as a whole, and about ten times the rate of Europe. It’s about five times the rate in the United States.
Many of those unemployed young men are angry, and making war is a typical activity of angry young men. But the women are not too happy either, and this is becoming a major threat to Islamic terrorists. In Islamic societies, women’s activities are greatly restricted. One thing they are encouraged to do is have lots of children. Many women in Islamic countries are rebelling against this. You don’t hear much about this, because women don’t rebel in the same loud, headline grabbing way that men do. What unhappy women often do is stop having children. Not so easy to do, you think? Well, think again.
Union-represented teachers in the Pulaski County School District stayed home Thursday to protest a school board decision to end recognition of their union.
All 39 schools in the 18,000-student district remained open, with substitute teachers and parent volunteers filling in for the absent teachers, Acting Superintendent Rob McGill said.
“Our first priority was getting students in the classrooms, getting substitutes or volunteers in the classrooms and proper supervision for the students,” McGill said.
“I’ve had no phone calls as far as schools saying (they are) overwhelmed and can’t handle the situation,” he added.
Of the district’s 1,380 teachers, 690 were out Thursday, exactly half. About a dozen teachers are out on a typical day, McGill said.
Eighty percent of Wisconsin school districts offer 4-year-old kindergarten (4K), educational programming that has been growing throughout the state.
Sixteen school districts opened 4K programs this year. The 333 districts that provide 4K programs are serving 38,075 children, an enrollment increase of more than 4,000 from last year. Of the districts providing 4K, 101 do so through the community approach, which blends public and private resources to allow more options for the care and education of all 4-year-olds.
Licensed teachers provide instruction for all public school district 4K programs. In the community approach, some districts provide a licensed 4K teacher in a private child care setting, some contract with Head Start or the child care setting for the licensed teachers, and others bring child care into the licensed 4K public school program or mesh licensed 4K services with a Head Start program. Wisconsin is one of the nation’s leading models for combining educational and community care services for 4-year-olds.
Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira, via email:
4-Year-Old Kindergarten (4K): The Board received updates from the community-based 4K planning committee in the areas of: 1) logistics; 2) curriculum; 3) public/community relations; 4) family outreach/involvement; 5) funding. The Board voted to have the District continue to work with the community in planning for 4K with an anticipated start date of September 2010, pending the determination of the availability of the resources necessary to support the new program. A presentation on financial resources will be made to the Board in December.
Financial Audit: As required by state statute, the MMSD hires an independent audit firm to perform an audit of our annual financial statements and review our compliance with federal program requirements. The audit looks at the financial operations of the District. This audit was completed by Clifton Gunderson LLP. The Board received the audit report and a summary from Clifton Gunderson.
When asked what the summary message was that we could share with the community, the response was that the District is in a very sound financial position. Results of operations for 2009 were very positive with $10M added to fund balance. The fund balance is critical to the operation of the District and the cash-flow of the District. We were pleased with the audit outcome. Math Task Force: The Board approved the administrative response to the 13 recommendations listed in the MMSD Math Task Force Report. The recommendations focused on middle school math specialists; district-wide curricular consistency; achievement gap; assessment; teacher collaboration; parent/community communication; balanced math approach; addressing failing grades in algebra; and algebra in 8th grade. The Board also asked for regular updates on the progress of plan implementation. The Task Force Report is located on the District’s web site.
Enrollment Data: The Board reviewed the enrollment data and projections for the District. One area that stood out was the overcrowding in some of the elementary schools in the La Follette attendance area. The Long Range Planning Committee is starting a series of meetings to study the overcrowding in this area and to develop recommendations for the Board on how to address this issue. It is anticipated that recommendations will be brought back to the Board in February. The Board will have the final say on how to deal with the overcrowding issues.
If you have any questions/comments, please let us know. board@madison.k12.wi.us
Arlene Silveira (516-8981)
What are the implications of “tracking,” or grouping students into separate classes based on their achievement? Many schools have moved away from this practice and reduced the number of subject-area courses offered in a given grade. In this new Thomas B. Fordham Institute report, Brookings scholar Tom Loveless examines tracking and detracking in Massachusetts middle schools, with particular focus on changes that have occurred over time and their implications for high-achieving students. Among the report’s key findings: detracked schools have fewer advanced students in mathematics than tracked schools. The report also finds that detracking is more popular in schools serving disadvantaged populations.
A new report out today makes the case that students do better in school when they are separated into groups based on their achievement.
Loveless found that de-tracked schools have fewer advanced students in math than do tracked schools–and that de-tracking is more popular in schools that serve disadvantaged students.
By 2011, if the states stick to their policy guns, all eighth graders in California and Minnesota will be required to take algebra. Other states are all but certain to follow. Assuming these courses hold water, some youngsters will dive in majestically and then ascend gracefully to the surface, breathing easily. Others, however, will smack their bellies, sink to the bottom and/or come up gasping. Clearly, the architects of this policy have the best of intentions. In recent years, the conventional wisdom of American K-12 education has declared algebra to be a “gatekeeper” to future educational and career success. One can scarcely fault policy makers for insisting that every youngster pass through that gate, lest too many find their futures constrained. It’s also well known that placing students in remedial classes rarely ends up doing them a favor, especially in light of evi- dence that low-performing students may learn more in heterogeneous classrooms.
Yet common sense must ask whether all eighth graders are truly prepared to succeed in algebra class. That precise question was posed in a recent study by Brookings scholar Tom Loveless (The 2008 Brown Center Report on American Education), who is also the author of the present study. He found that over a quarter of low-performing math students–those scoring in the bottom 10 percent on NAEP–were enrolled in advanced math courses in 2005. Since these “misplaced” students are ill-pre- pared for the curricular challenges that lie ahead, Loveless warned, pushing an “algebra for all” policy on them could further endanger their already-precarious chances of success.
When American education produced this situation by abolishing low-level tracks and courses, did people really believe that such seemingly simple–and well-meanin –changes in policy and school organization would magically transform struggling learners into middling or high-achieving ones? And were they oblivious to the effects that such alterations might have on youngsters who were al- ready high-performing?
Andreal Davis – Madison School District Instructional Resource Teacher for Cultural Relevance, via a kind reader’s email:
Communalism is the concept that the duty to one’s family and social group is more important that individual rights and privileges. On November 4, 2009 I personally experienced this concept through President Barack Obama’s visit to James Coleman Wright Middle School.
The experience began with my 12 year old son, Ari Davis, being selected to lead the Pledge of Allegiance during the ceremony. Minutes after being informed of this special occasion, I was invited to attend the event as a member of the Madison Metropolitan School District staff. Thus, I attended the ceremony wearing two hats, one as a parent and the other as an educator.
On the day of this event, several of us anxiously awaited – for more than four hours – the arrival of President Obama. During this period I experienced first hand the spirit of communalism. A recap of my educational career began to unfold in the parking lot as I held conversations with past and current MMSD colleagues. As I entered Wright Middle School I had the opportunity to interact with students I had taught at Lincoln Elementary. This allowed me to see some products of my work by listening to their thought provoking reactions to the President’s impending visit.
America has tried many strategies over the decades to reverse the slow, steady decline in its public schools. Few of these have delivered real results. The “classrooms without walls” of the 1970s, for example, were supposed to open students’ minds to creativity and curiosity. It worked for some kids, but too many others ended up merely distracted. In the ’90s, school vouchers–publicly financed scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools–were praised as a way to give families choices and pressure schools to improve. Vouchers helped a fraction of families across the country but didn’t instigate any real change. The 2002 No Child Left Behind requirements were supposed to guarantee that every kid learned at least the “three R” basics. English and math scores for elementary students did inch up, but the scores of average American high schoolers on international science and math tests continued to sink. The United States currently ranks 17th in science and 24th in math, near the bottom of the developed world.
Now President Obama has launched the Race to the Top campaign to improve schools by holding students to higher standards, paying bonuses to teachers whose students excel, and replacing the worst schools with supposedly nimbler and more intimate charter schools. This time will be different, he insists, because he’s only going to promote strategies proven to help students, and he’s going to reward the winners of his reform race with prize money from a stimulus fund of at least $4 billion, a slice of the more than $100 billion he set aside for education in the stimulus bill.
Five months after it first announced coming privacy changes this past summer, Facebook is finally rollingout a new set of revamped privacy settings for its 350 million users. The social networking site has rightly been criticized for its confusing privacy settings, most notably in a must-read report by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner issued in July and most recently by a Norwegian consumer protection agency. We’re glad to see Facebook is attempting to respond to those privacy criticisms with these changes, which are going live this evening. Unfortunately, several of the claimed privacy “improvements” have created new and serious privacy problems for users of the popular social network service.
The new changes are intended to simplify Facebook’s notoriously complex privacy settings and, in the words of today’s privacy announcement to all Facebook users, “give you more control of your information.” But do all of the changes really give Facebook users more control over their information? EFF took a close look at the changes to figure out which ones are for the better — and which ones are for the worse.
Our conclusion? These new “privacy” changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data.
